The slender fir, that taper grows, The sturdy oak, with broad-spread boughs. Haunt of Phyllis, Queen of Love! Lies a long and level lawn, On which a dark hill, steep and high,1 And see the rivers, how they run Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view! The wooded valleys, warm and low, The windy summit, wild and high See, on the mountain's southern side, How close and small the hedges lie! The Country Walk, though minutely detailed and proving close and accurate observation, is more common1 This is Dinevawr, or possibly Newton Castle. place. In The Ruins of Rome the note is more rhetorical, but the pictures are vivid :— The rising sun Flames on the ruins, in the purer air Or again The setting sun displays His visible great round between yon towers, And certainly the poem contains one of the finest onomatopoeic effects in our language, to say nothing of the fine imaginative power of the passage: The pilgrim oft At dead of night, 'mid his orison hears Aghast the voice of Time, disparting towers, Rattling around, loud thund'ring to the moon. The descriptive passages in The Fleece have all the excellence of the particular kind indicated by Wordsworth. Take a typical passage-all who are acquainted with the parts of England here described will recognise the accuracy of the picture : Such the spacious plain Of Sarum, spread like Ocean's boundless round, Ruin of ages, nods: such, too, the leas And Shobden, for its lofty terrace famed, Which from a mountain's ridge, elate o'er woods Regions on regions blended in the clouds. The Fleece is, it must be owned, very heavy reading, "buried in woollen," as a contemporary critic wittily observed of its author; and as the descriptive passages are strictly subordinate to the didactic portion, their felicity lies rather in their terse and graphic force, such as Enormous rocks on rocks, in ever-wild And this description of a calm in the Tropics The downy feather on the cordage hung, Moves not the flat sea shines like yellow gold Fus'd in the fire. Dyer is, indeed, a most pleasing poet, and few would dispute what Wordsworth has expressed in his Sonnet to him : A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay, Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray, AKENSIDE, ARMSTRONG, SHENSTONE, GRAINGER, MALLET, AND SMOLLETT THERE is little to detain us in Akenside and Armstrong, who are rather rhetoricians than poets, and yet The Pleasures of the Imagination is in some respects a memorable poem, and at times not without the note of nobility, and The Art of Preserving Health deserves more readers than it finds. Natural description in Akenside is strictly subordinated to his didactic purpose. He was born in November 1721, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in a fragment of an intended Fourth Book to his chief poem, written in the last year of his life, he thus refers, not without pathos, to the haunts of his youth : O ye dales Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where And his banks open and his lawns extend, The rocky pavement and the mossy falls The two passages in his poem which are his most elaborate Nature-pictures are his description in the Second Book of the wild spot where the Genius who describes to him "the gracious ways of providence confronts him, and the following passage in the Third Book, where he shows how man reads into Nature "the inexpressive semblance of himself, of thought and passion" : Mark the sable woods That shade sublime yon mountain's nodding brow: Of Minos or of Numa should forsake Th' Elysian seats, and down the embowering glade Armstrong's prosaic theme, with its subdivisions of “Air,” “Diet," "Exercise," "The Passions," does not promise much poetry, and poetry we do not find, but his |